© 2003 BMJ Publishing Group
EDUCATION
SURVEILLANCE IN OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH
1 Head, Dept of Community, Occupational and Family Medicine, Medical Faculty, National University of Singapore, 16 Medical Drive, Singapore 117597
2 Head, Division of Occupational Health, Kent Institute of Medicine & Health Sciences, University of Kent at Canterbury, Kent CT2 7PD, UK
Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Professor T-C Aw, Head, Division of Occupational Health, Kent Institute of Medicine & Health Sciences, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent CT2 7PD, UK;
t.c.aw@kent.ac.uk
Keywords: biological monitoring; genetic biomarkers; hazard; health surveillance; sentinel health event
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
A definition of surveillance is as follows: "surveillance (ser-vâ1lens) noun. 1. Close observation of a person or group, especially one under suspicion. 2. The act of observing or the condition of being observed" (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 3rd edition, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1992).
The term "surveillance" is derived from the French word meaning "to watch over". In public health, surveillance was originally developed as part of efforts to control infectious diseases, but the principles of surveillance can potentially be applied to other problems such as chronic diseases (for example, cancer and coronary heart disease), social problems (for example, drug addiction), and the threat of bioterrorism.1
Surveillance is a core activity in the practice of occupational health. Two broad groups of surveillance are commonly performed—hazard surveillance and health surveillance. While the focus of the former is hazards at the workplace, the latter type of
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